Environmental Stress, Social Networks, and Older Age Health and Mortality

环境压力、社会网络与老年健康和死亡率本项目将探讨早期生活环境压力如何影响老年发病率和死亡率，以及社会网络如何调节压力的影响。该项目将更好地了解风险因素、保护因素和早期生活经历如何影响长期健康结果。更好地了解健康途径可能使我们能够操纵早期风险因素和保护因素，并可能导致我们在更年轻的年龄增加健康投资。更好地了解衰老过程也将为我们预测老年人死亡率和发病率趋势提供信息，因此对我们预测未来的养老金和医疗保健费用也有影响。这个项目的独特之处在于它能够在同一数据集内检查早期生活事件、老年死亡率和医生评估的发病率，以及对社会网络的详细测量。具体而言，本项目将通过研究战时压力和战俘状态对老年人发病率和死亡率的影响，并确定公司凝聚力、社区和家庭支持如何调节压力的影响，来研究环境压力。该项目将研究1)战俘状况如何影响50岁及以上人口的死亡率和发病率；2)如何衡量战时压力，以及战时压力如何影响50岁及以上人群的疾病和死亡；3)个人、公司、家庭和社区特征（如个人健康状况下降、公司凝聚力、配偶死亡和社区对战争的支持）如何介导战俘状态和战时压力对老年死亡率和发病率的影响。该项目将使用39,616名联邦军队退伍军人的纵向数据和2000名安德森维尔幸存者的纵向数据集，这些数据将作为该项目的一部分创建。这些数据集提供了一个独特的机会来研究战俘状态和战时压力的长期疤痕效应，因为这些人从年轻到死亡的完整生活史被观察到，包括老年时的详细医疗记录。由于南北战争期间战俘和战时经历有相当大的差异，这些数据为研究极端压力的影响提供了几个对照组。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Environmental Stress, Social Networks, and Older Age Health and Mortality This project will investigate how early life environmental stress affects older age morbidity and mortality, and how social networks mediate the effects of stress. This project will provide a better understanding of how risk factors, protective factors, and early-life experience affect long-run health outcomes. A better understanding of health pathways may allow us to manipulate early risk factors and protective factors and may lead us to increase health investments at younger ages. A better understanding of senescent processes will also inform our predictions of older age mortality and morbidity trends and therefore has implications for our predictions of future pension and health care costs. This project is unique in its ability to examine earlier life events, older age mortality and physician-assessed morbidity, and detailed measures of social networks all within the same dataset. Specifically, this project will study environmental stress by examining the older age morbidity and mortality effects of wartime stress and POW status and determining how company cohesion and community and family support mediate the effects of stress. The project will examine 1) how POW status affected mortality and morbidity at ages 50 and over; 2) how wartime stress should be measured and how wartime stress affected disease and death at ages 50 and over; and, 3) how individual, company, family, and community characteristics such as individual health declines, company cohesion, the death of a spouse, and community support for the war mediated the effects of POW status and wartime stress on older age mortality and morbidity. The project will use longitudinal data on 39,616 Union Army veterans and a longitudinal dataset of 2,000 Andersonville survivors that will be created as part of this project. These datasets provide a unique opportunity to study the long-term scarring effects of POW status and wartime stress because the full life history of these men from early youth to death is observed, including detailed medical records at older ages. Because there was considerable variation in POW and wartime experience during the Civil War, the data provide several control groups for examining the effects of extreme stress.